Acceptable?

Not much has been left unsaid concerning the Michael Richards incident. The incident at the comedy store in which Richards became so frustrated that he began shouting racial slurs was ushered to the forefront of public attention thanks to one person in the audience who had the foresight to film the entire thing.

Immediately the entire public turned on Richards. His presence in the media had since vanished with the conclusion of Seinfeld but as Cashmore reminds us, it only takes a scandal to bring someone back into the public eye.



The aftermath was interesting as someone who had been reseeking the status of celebrity suddenly got his wish, but probably not in the way that he had hoped.
Everyone said pretty much the same thing about Richards, “He’s finished” or something along those lines. But then suddenly, he makes a semi-comeback.

On this past season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David, the creator of the show and the co-creator of Seinfeld, created a story arc for this season which essentially called of the old actors from Seinfeld back for a reunion show.

Larry David did not shy away from the conflict that Richards had brought on himself. In one episode, Leon, a Black character on the show, knocks on the Richard’s door and when Richards opens the door he looks at Leon and comically begs for forgiveness because the incident happened years ago.

Celebrities are people and sometimes we forget this, and I can say, as someone who has taken the stage to do Stand Up; I don’t fault Michael Richards at all for what he did. He got carried away because things weren’t going well. This wasn’t so much an indication that he’s a racist, but much more so that he’s really just a crappy comic who cracks under pressure.

Either way, it’s certainly interesting to look at Michael Richard’s career and take note that he was most famous when he was at his best (Kramer) and at his worst (a shouting “racist”). What the public misses out on is the in between, I think that’s an important thing to remember here, we don’t get to see celebrities just being regular people so we expect more from them. We don’t see celebrities scratching their underwear on the way to the bathroom at 3 in the morning. It’s because their humanity is protected from the public eye that fame itself comes from a person’s peaks and valleys.